[R] R on amazon's EC2 "cloud"?

[Blair Christian]

Hi All,

I was wondering if anybody had experience running R on amazon's ec2
"cloud"?  More specifically, has anybody created an "amazon machine
image" (AMI) for use with it?  I was wondering if there was a quantian
type image available as an amazon machine image, maybe running debian
or ubuntu?   It supports open MPI among other libs which is nice.

It would be nice to put together a hardware optimized image that the
community could use (eg lapack with openmp blas support that kind of
thing), maybe a debian with no X installed, but including R + all
packages?

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

I'm at the point where it's almost easier/cost effective to outsource
the hardware...

I bring this up because I saw that they were going to start a spot
market for cycles- useful for things like MCMC chains that need lots
of runs...
http://bit.ly/8A2e1g